Look Back With A Vu Toward Deja

The March cover of Esquire features an attempt to make sense of the nation`s increasing fascination with Ralph Kramden, Beaver Cleaver and other remnants of the video past by Tom Shales, an entertaining stylist who watches television fulltime for the Washington Post.

``The Re Decade is the decade of replay, recycle, recall, retrieve, reprocess and rerun,`` he writes. ``When everybody is having deja vu, nobody is having deja vu. Deja is the prevailing vu.``

Television, he maintains, is the ``national time machine,`` whose watchers are developing a deeply warped sense of time. Developers of ``new``

programming are parasites, he believes, feeding off the past and creating shows not from virginal ideas, but from scraps of old ideas.

We can tape anything, whether it`s a child`s life on portable 8 mm. video equipment or a David Letterman show on a videocassette recorder. We can then watch anything, calling up the long-gone instantly, discerning no clear difference between what`s current and what`s far gone.

Moreover, Shales contends, we`ve now been conditioned to expect replays of everything, whether a 30-year-old ``Honeymooners`` episode, 10-second-old touchdown or attempt on the President`s life. He quotes one thoughtful media and advertising analyst as convinced that, when it comes to our cognitive processes, electronic replay may be the most important invention since the book.

Among the ultimate results, Shales concludes, is an absence of much that`s original. Why create anew when one can profitably regurgitate the previously produced? Don`t be fooled, he cautions, by the likes of the heralded ``Miami Vice,`` which he finds to be nothing more than a mix of

Another result is numbness. ``When an attempt was made on President Reagan`s life during his first term, the act was caught on tape, and the image was replayed and replayed until it became virtually meaningless, as meaningless as a deodorant commercial or line-drive base hit from last July or the hottest music video of the first week in the third month of 1984.``

``We feel we`ve seen it all before. We have. We feel we`ll see it all again. We will. We will. We will.``

-- Atlantic (March)--Conor Cruise O`Brien`s ``What Can Become of South Africa?`` is an analysis whose lucid summary of the evolution of race relations in that country is more helpful than its very speculative closing. O`Brien, a staunch critic of apartheid, is aghast at the murderous turn taken by admittedly oppressed black youth, deriding a ``rule of the children`` that he finds to be part of a ``political movement whose sanction, symbol and signature is the burning alive of people in the street.`` He ends by raising the prospect of a forced end to white repression via military intervention, replete with a naval blockade, backed by the United States and Soviet Union and carrying the sanction of the United Nations. It seems quite far-fetched but, then again, so does white majority rule there in 1986. Elsewhere, there are pieces on Soviet bumbling in trying to catch up with the West in computers, improvements in weather forecasting and traditional midterm congressional losses suffered by a President`s party, with political scientist Norman Ornstein revealing a severe case of Washington myopia as he writes that Republicans are ``haunted`` by a huge midterm setback in 1958.

-- Electronic House (January-February)--This is the premier of a journal of home automation designed for those interested in gadget- and microchip-filled ``smart houses.`` Your electric garage door opener, alas, is not the pinnacle of post-World War II, American technology. This reveals how a handicapped person controls 64 remote home appliances without leaving a wheelchair and of the existence of such oddities as an attic fan that triggers automatically when heat builds up to a certain levels. Interviews with home builders and contractors in Silicon Valley indicate that in the land of electronic wizards, most of those brilliant engineers uniformly shy away from snazzy houses fitted with micro-electronic gizmos ($2.95, 524 E. McKinley Ave., Mishawaka, Ind. 46545).

Ladies` Home Journal (March)--In case you missed last November`s ``dinner of the decade,`` the British Embassy affair in Washington for Prince Charles and Lady Di, Journal staffers have diligently met with the chef and procured recipes for Terrine Charles, roast saddle of lamb, potatoes Bernier and Princess Diana Cake. In another tribute to tough-minded probing, gossip meister Aileen (``Suzy``) Mehle selects the world`s 23 ``most beautiful women.`` She divides them into categories of ``legendary`` beauties (Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, Ava Gardner, Jean Shrimpton, among others),